Name: Cheese Tortellini with Cauliflower Sauce, Tomatoes, & Brussels Sprouts
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 10 min
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients: 19 ounce bag frozen cheese tortellini; 1 tablespoon unsalted butter; 3/4 lb. Brussels sprouts, trimmed and shredded on the slicer disk of a food processor (if you don’t have a food processor, use a sharp knife to slice the Brussels into thin discs); 14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes with garlic and oregano (I used Red Gold), drained; 1 cup creamy cauliflower sauce; salt and pepper, to taste

This cheese tortellini is fresh and delicious, topped with cauliflower sauce, Brussels sprouts, and tomatoes. It’s a great vegetarian dinner!

There are many things that I love about my job as a behavior analyst for a large school system. Long breaks are not the least of these, as I am sure you can imagine (though I can honestly say that breaks were in now way a motivation for me to pursue a career in education, as many like to purport, and they also have nothing to do with why I have remained in the field of education for more than fourteen years). A friend asked me a while back why teachers always say that they that they love their jobs, but they SO look forward to breaks. There are two types of people that would ask this question: (1) people who have never been teachers and therefore don’t understand exactly how physically, mentally, and emotionally tiring teaching is; and (2) people who have never had summer, winter, spring, or fall break as a regular fixture of their job. I mean, come on. If you had that amount of time off to look forward to, you’d be pretty ready for a break by the end of the quarter too!

There’s a problem with all those breaks, though…particularly the longer ones. That problem is Newton’s Third Law, i.e. “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Any working stiff can attest to the fact that the days, the moments leading up to a vacation are wonderful, delicious moments that defy comparison, as are the early moments of the break. The end of a vacation, though, regardless of your feelings for your job, brings feelings of sadness, loss, anguish. Okay, I exaggerate. But it amazes me that I can lie around and do nothing for two weeks and feel completely and utterly exhausted when I have to go back to work (I’m positive that it has nothing to do with the fact that I love to stay up late and threw my sleep schedule totally out of whack).

For this reason, it’s important that I choose dinners that are quick and easy to prepare on the weeks that I return from a break. It doesn’t hurt when those meals produce leftovers. And, since my new, more sedentary job means that I can no longer fit into my favorite jeans, it doesn’t hurt when they are a little lower on the calorie counts (I’ve been killing it with my new FitBit, logging my meals onto MyFitnessPal, and doing workouts from Fitness Blender, though!). This dish, cheese tortellini with cauliflower sauce, tomatoes, & Brussels sprouts fits that bill. Cauliflower sauce, which I discovered on Pinch of Yum, is amazingly rich and creamy while managing to be low in calories and high in nutrition (and there’s even an ebook of nothing but cauliflower sauce recipes!).

Oh, and another benefit of long breaks? Getting time to do things that I’m usually too tired for…like giving my kitchen a facelift. Our house was built in 1977 (it’s older than me!) and I had had it up to here with the ugly, dark melamine cabinets (with wood-grained veneers!) and the laminate “butcher block” countertops. So we painted them! Or at least we started painting them. Top cabinets are done, bottom cabinets not yet, and walls and floors will come later…but I am most excited about the countertops, which we painted using Rust-Oleum Countertop Transformations. I’ll post more about the process once we get it all done, but suffice it to say it’s messy. But that’s okay, because essentially we got countertops for less than $300. And I took these pictures on them! Once we get the bottom cabinets and the walls done, I’m hoping to build the Chattavore YouTube channel (I really don’t know if I want you guys to click on that link).